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To stay motivated, I read a lot of Amazon reviews on various workout videos. It is addicting and it gets me excited to try out a video (and get sweaty!). It’s a way of visualizing how the future can be for me through other people’s experiences!

Not somewhere I want to be unless I am the only person there!

So I’m reading the reviews and occasionally someone would mention how they have been doing exercise videos for decades and self-identify as intermediate or advanced exercisers (or specifically mentioning that they are not beginners). Many would follow up with how they do not go to the gym, ever.

After reading that statement as many times as I have, I realized that I want to be like these people and just workout to videos at home. I want to be like those who have been doing it decades!

And why is that?

Because like them, I don’t want to go to the gym to workout. I have a certain loathing for the gym as you know it, a big smelly room full of equipment and mirrors. Frankly, I don’t know the first thing to do and just feel like a moron when I go.

I mentioned before that I am the perfect gym customer: someone who pays the yearly fee, go once or twice, and never come back. It’s not for the lack of motivation, but because it is embarrassing for me to go. It is embarrassing not because I am out of shape (sure, I can tone up a bit), but because I feel like a clueless idiot! I am a clueless idiot, but I want to be a little secretive about it and not broadcast to the world, ha!

The whole point of a gym is to work out and feel better about yourself right? But not at a gym like that for me. I feel like I have to work out and get some experience just so I don’t embarrass myself.

So there you have it. If all I need is a TV, DVD player, a mat and some hand weights to get a good workout, that is all the gym that I need. The best part, is when it is in your home, you have NO EXCUSE to work out!

I have been thinking quite a bit about the goal that I want to work towards.

Initially, I figured I needed to join a sport of some sort since it would be easier to visualize. So maybe working towards a body competition, you know, the fit ladies who are super tanned in skimpy bikinis? I had a friend who was into it and I know she devotes an inordinate amount of time to prepare for it. I then remembered that I am an introvert and doing anything on stage practically naked is probably not a good idea.

So what about rock climbing, boxing, cycling, triathlons, half marathons, power-lifting, etc.? It dawned on me that choosing a specific sport too soon is too much commitment in time and money for something I don’t know if I will like just so I can force myself into a goal.

I figured I should start with the journey before I determine an “end goal.” So ultimately, I decided that…

I want to get into the best shape I have ever been

I want to incorporate exercise videos into my life as a daily habit (I want to feel weird if I go a day without doing it)

I want to be able to develop my cardio endurance enough so that I can participate in a 5k without stopping, maybe in a Disneyworld 5k!

I want to be able to do a proper pull-up/chin-up, 5 total! (for now)

Lastly, I want to be able to do a hand stand, hand stand push-up, and maybe walk on my hands!

Yes, that’s literally it. Those are the goals for now. I would like to learn how to swim eventually and maybe even do a proper cartwheel. Heck, I might even work up into playing basketball or some kind of adult sports league. We’ll see!

I will be posting in this format which will allow me to write freely and post it once a week to avoid annoying any readers (my mom, ha!). I would much rather devote the daily energy to working out and and watching what I eat!

During the time leading up to the great big “Sore Weekend,” I was still attempting my daily Fitbit goal of 10k steps a day, which I will regularly reach after walking to and from work and marching in places or pacing around the apartment to finish off the remaining 2k steps or so. If it is a busy walking day where I might clock in 15k steps, I would be sore the next day! So while I was much more active than the previous 5 years, I was still out of shape.

Starting in early November, I slowly incorporated Intermittent Fasting as a part of my “diet” although I feel it would be more apt to describe it as a habit instead. I’ll post a longer entry on it eventually, but the gist is that I follow an 8/16 hour cycle of feeding and fasting. I would eat within an 8 hour window and fast in the remaining 16. It amounts to basically skipping breakfast and having lunch at noon and dinner finished by 8pm. I would adjust the dinner time accordingly depending on when my first meal of the day was. Eating between the lunch and dinner hours are fine too and I do snack as normal. I found that cutting breakfast had removed about 300-400 calories from my diet which was hovering about 1600-1700 calories a day. I was now keeping it about 1200-1300 per day which is recommended for someone who sat around all day as I did.

This is what happens when you’re an adult with some disposable income. You spend it on things like these. Thanks Ebay!

I went all out and spent about $30 on old-ass PlayMobil figures. If you’re wondering why I have so many of the little boys in the blue shirt and white pants, it’s because that was the one I had in particular as a kid. Just that one. We were poor, ok?

I got him when I was in the single digit age-group (I forgot from whom). For whatever reason, I had named him “Bob.” I had Bob for several years and I loved that little guy. In my teens (or tweens?), my youngest brother, who was a toddler at that that time, broke poor Bob in half while I as away at school. I was traumatized by it. I cried! I also never forgave my little brother. I hate him. (I really don’t hate him.)

And now, I somehow found myself on a PlayMobil fan site that had all the background and history on the toys and… decided to just buy some Bobs to replace the one I lost. For good measure, I bought a bunch of little friends for him too.

Now I have an army of Bobs and one Bobbette. They will take over the world.

I moved a couple of time since the last post. I would like to stay in one place for at least 2 years before another move (bleh), so here’s to hoping everything remains stable. I haven’t really been working on the personal business stuff since I’ve gotten back to working full time at a more demanding job and started working on a masters degree. So the business-for-fun, the writing, and other intensive hobbies have kind of tapered down. Now that things are kind of settled in terms of moving, working, and school, I think I can slowly get back into the fun stuff. Yeah, it’s time to get back to work, work on the fun stuff!

So you notice a lot of new, old posts? Yeah, I’m slowly migrating my various blogs (writing, origami so far) into this one. It would be cheaper an easier than trying to manage 4-5 different site content and WordPress installs. So here I am! Consolidating!

So one of my crappy shared hosting accounts had expired and I didn’t think much of it. This particular account was used mostly for testing purposes, but I didn’t realize/had forgotten that this blog was hosted there…

After a few notices from the hosting provider that I didn’t care too much about, *POOF* everything was gone and deleted.

Including this blog.

*Sigh*

Fortunately, I had backed it up somewhat. Unfortunately, the backup was only up to the end of 2010.

This blog wasn’t tended to as frequently as the other ones because it’s not part of my business, per se. It’s mostly something I use for fun. So of course I did not set the usual bare minimum automated backup tasks. Heck, I didn’t even subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed so I can’t use the saved feeds to scrape the old posts back.

Hell, I only even noticed this thing was missing because I wanted to test some things.

I thought about finding the cached search engine versions, but seeing how this blog isn’t all that popular, the posts were barely crawled to begin with and is very incomplete.

I have no idea what’s missing. It’s OK for the most part, but it still kind of sucks that it’s gone.

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